You might remember my mumblings about the Creative Fellowship, Cassandra Conety was hired to come every morning to do the morning chores so I could get to work early on my book. We all know the joke about God and plans, and he was yukking it up last week, I imagine.

My plan was to get up at 4 a.m., go right to work, Cassandra would take care of everything. And she does, she conscientious, thorough, without drama, and highly competent. We were calling it the Creative Fellowship, so I wouldn’t think it was about my not being able to handle things.

And it would well be a Creative Fellowship…Perhaps tomorrow, I don’t want to promise another plan and give God something else to chuckle about.

Nobody told the universe about our fellowship.

Sunday, the biggest storm of the winter struck just as Maria made her way to Boston’s Logan Airport. The farm and the pasture were buried in snow, more than 14 inches. I spent two days digging out, raking snow off of rooftops, shoveling paths, hauling firewood in.

And the minute I stopped shoveling, my computer crashed and burned, the first time that has ever happened to me in my long and happy relationship with Apple. I could blog on Maria’s old laptop (actually it was my old laptop first), but had no access to my book or my photos.

We don’t really know what happened to the computer, for once the Apple techs were not helpful, they did something to the hard drive called partitioning, and paralyzed the computer completely. In desperation, I took it to a place called Brown’s Computer Solutions in Bennington, they are a licensed Apple repair place, but the computer was such a mess it took them four days to repair it.

They did repair it, it is working beautifully, it came home this morning to its rightful place on my desk.

My entire creative life is tied up in this machine, my book chapters are all intact. My photos – thousands of them – are all on an external hard drive, which was somehow damaged in all of the chaos. I might get them back, or I might not, we won’t know till later in the week.

I have this odd thing about photos, I don’t like to look back much, if they are gone, I will take new ones. But I bought a new and small  2 terrabyte drive, and we are hoping to transfer the old drive onto it, with all of my photos and my photo library.

I often say that Steve Jobs was more of an influence on my life than my father, and sadly, this is so. Jobs created the Apple for people like me – creatives who were not necessarily tech savvy and didn’t really wish to be. Apple computers have managed and stretched my creativity at every stage. Because of Jobs and his vision, I manage my photos, write my books, publish my blog, handle my mail, do my voice posts.

Despite this mishap, their tech support has always been wonderful, enabling me to not learn much about computers. I did back the computer up every day, another plan gone awry – it only works if the place you are putting them is functioning. That’s the story with computers.

It was hard to have Maria and my computer gone at the same time, my world was truly upended. I got no work done on my book, for all of that. Tomorrow, I hope that changes. Cassandra is coming, and I will be up early writing in my study.

I feel so much better seeing my computer in its rightful place, at the center of my creative universe. My Yoda. Now, we need Maria to come home. Just a few days and my world will be put back together again.